While the connections between slavery and the production of cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane are widely recognized, the critical role of the humble peanut in the persistence of slavery and the reach of European colonialism in West Africa is less well-known. Journalist Jori Lewis’s Slaves for Peanuts  (The New Press) explores this little-studied chapter of global history.

Sandra Jackson-Opoku, author of The River Where Blood Is Born, writes

Within these pages, you’ll encounter plagues and palace intrigues, adventures and misadventures, kingmakers and kingbreakers, fortunes won and lost—all wrapped around the mighty peanut! In well-researched, engaging prose, Jori Lewis unravels the intimate connections between this major export crop, enslavement, and abolition on Senegambian soil. The wars fought over it, and the history that surrounds it. This work is an important contribution to African historiography.

Working at the intersection of studies of agriculture and slavery, this book mines European and African archives to reveal how the global demand for peanut oil fueled the continuation of slavery in Africa well into the twentieth century, long after the European powers had officially banned it in the territories they controlled. Lewis narrates this history from the personal, grounded perspectives of so many West African people: from an African-born French missionary harboring runaway slaves, to the leader of a Wolof state navigating the politics of French imperialism. 

This extensively researched monograph is the winner of the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship and the Harriet Tubman Prize. NPR celebrates the book for “shining a light on another glaring example of Western hypocrisy and oppression” by narrating a “a fascinating and disturbing slice of history.” By uncovering the hidden connections between the agricultural development of the peanut in West Africa, insatiable European consumption, and the horrors of the slave trade, Lewis urges us to re-examine our assumptions about the individuals and forces that drove the slave trade. Praised for being “superbly readable,” Slaves for Peanuts offers an informative and engaging account of how a single crop came to shape the world.

Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist who writes about agriculture and the environment. Her reports have appeared on PRI’s The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Lewis splits her time between Illinois and Senegal. This is her first book.

Read an excerpt of this book here and buy a copy here.